by Sarai Walker
As we walked there, Marlowe holding her baby, me holding the bag with my dress in it, I realized I hadn’t been registering the electric shocks and other unpleasant symptoms. Of all the women in Verena’s orbit, I liked Marlowe the best so far, even though I knew she was part of the New Baptist Plan, the purpose of which was to change my mind about what I wanted so badly.
“What exactly is Calliope House?” I asked.
“If you want to be old school about it, you could call it a feminist collective. Verena has this massive house and more money than God, and she provides living space or office space for women who interest her for the work they do or the potential they have. Women come and go, as they need her. She’s a good egg.”
A collector of women.
I explained to Marlowe about the surgery. I wasn’t sure what she knew already, but I explained about the thin woman living inside me. It seemed ridiculous when I said it out loud, but Marlowe had shared her story with me. She was fat too, though not as fat as I was. Maybe she would understand. “Verena wants me to practice being Alicia. She wants me to have this makeover and go on dates, since that’s what Alicia would do.”
“Let’s not call it a makeover,” said Marlowe. “We’re going to up your fuckability quotient.”
That didn’t sound pleasant. A simple manicure and haircut was likely not what Marlowe had in mind.
We arrived at Calliope House, and as I walked through the door I felt a stab of electricity in my head. Even with my eyes closed I could sense that people were staring at me, but I needed to wait for the sensations to pass. When I opened my eyes, Julia was standing before me in the entryway, seemingly on her way out. She was wearing the beige trench coat, this time with the collar up.
“I dropped by to say hello. I trust that you are well,” she said, nibbling the arm of her sunglasses.
“I’ve been better. How are you? How’s Leeta?”
“Leeta doesn’t work for me anymore. Don’t ask about her.”
“What happened?”
“I’d rather not talk about it. By the way, thank you for sending Kitty’s list of upcoming articles. It’s the usual sewage, but keep feeding me information. I like to know what’s going on.”
“I’m the last person on Kitty’s staff to know what’s going on,” I said, not adding that I wasn’t even doing my job anymore.
“Yes, but you’re the only one I can trust, so I’ll have to make do.” She smiled primly and moved toward me, aiming for a kiss on the cheek but landing in the spot behind my ear, near my hairline. She lingered for a moment, her arm wrapped around my waist, her breath on my neck. She seemed to be inhaling me. When her head resurfaced, she said, “It was lovely bumping into you, as always,” and walked out the door.
Marlowe, who had observed our interaction, said, “No comment.” I was left to wonder what had happened to Leeta. Julia wanted information from me but rarely shared any herself.
I followed Marlowe into the living room. It was redder and brighter than I had remembered, like the inside of a cherry lozenge. She set a dozing Huck on the sofa, where he curled into a ball. In the middle of the room was an overturned plastic crate, and she asked me to stand on it.
“Let’s see what you brought,” she said, picking up the bag and pulling out the white poplin shirtdress. “This should be no problem. Do you mind if we measure you?”
A woman with a tape measure and a pad of paper appeared. “This is Rubí Ramirez,” said Marlowe. I recalled the name Rubí from one of my conversations with Verena. She was the one who’d gone to Paris to get the diet drug she called Dabsitaf.
“Hello,” Rubí said, and I returned the greeting. She began to wrap the tape around me, making me feel like a prize pig. She and I probably weighed the same, but she was short. Her black hair was nearly shaved on one side, shoulder length on the other, the tips of her spiky bangs bright blue. She wore shorts and a tank top, her olive limbs ringed with rolls of fat—an image of the Michelin Man came to mind. I would have never worn an outfit like that.
Rubí hadn’t explained why she was measuring me, but if she was going to remake the white poplin shirtdress in my size, she’d be wasting her time. I had no intention of wearing any such dress in my size, but I didn’t say so. I just needed to get through the makeover. It would be over soon and then the $20,000 would be mine.
“Rubí has made several dresses for me,” Marlowe said. “DIY. Or what I like to call FFI—Fuck the Fashion Industry.” I had never heard anyone say the word fuck in such a variety of ways. There was little doubt what Huck’s first word would be. It couldn’t be a coincidence that his name rhymed with it.
Rubí chatted as she measured me, explaining that she was campaigning against Dabsitaf with Verena. Before becoming an activist, she said she had been a headless plus-size model. Her modeling agency had made a fortune selling photos and film footage of Rubí to the major news organizations. From the neck down, Rubí appeared in magazines and especially on news programs, where she was featured walking down the street in slow motion, an ice cream cone or hot dog in her hand, while the voice of the reporter gave scary statistics about expanding waistlines and type 2 diabetes and said things like, “The obesity epidemic is America’s looming holocaust.” Rubí was filmed struggling to stand up from park benches and restaurant booths and airline seats. Dieting tips were flashed on the screen over a freeze-frame of her ass, which she said looked to be covered in acres of denim. Her head was never shown. Rubí was so successful as an “obesity epidemic” headless model that she earned a nickname in the industry: Marie Fatoinette.
“I gave up modeling to become an activist,” she said. “We all do things we regret when we’re young, right?” I supposed that question was directed at me, but I remained silent, my arms outstretched, waiting for the inventory of my body to be finished. A dark-haired woman poked her head into the living room, glancing at me in my scarecrow pose. She didn’t say anything, but bit into a green apple. Half her face was scarred. It looked melted and pink. I turned away from her and from Rubí, looking up at the ceiling. Verena’s house was some kind of freak show.
When the measuring was over, Marlowe asked Verena to take care of Huck until her husband could pick him up. Verena was wearing a top that looked like a remnant of an old prom dress.
Before the makeover began in earnest, I felt compelled to check with her one last time: “You’re going to give me the twenty thousand at the end of this, right?”
“Of course. A Baptist never lies.”
I looked at her skeptically.
“Correction. This Baptist never lies.”
Marlowe and I left Calliope House to begin what she called “a few days of fabulous fuckability fun.”
“Why don’t you just call it attractiveness? I prefer that.”
“Attractive is too benign. Quaint. In our mothers’ day, it used to be enough to have a pretty face or a nice figure, which was bad enough, but now you must be the perfect fuck-doll too.”
“What’s a fuck-doll?”
Marlowe, oblivious to my question, spoke a language I didn’t understand. She pulled a copy of Fuckability Theory from her bag and began to read from it: “Page two: We all want to be attractive to our partner, but being fuckable is about more than that. It’s about having a high fuckability quotient on the open market, as if we’re stocks with a value that rises and falls.”
Our first stop was a salon with a pink awning. “My friend here has an appointment for a waxing,” Marlowe said to the woman who greeted us at the door. The woman was wearing a coat like a doctor might wear, except hers was pink.
“What am I having waxed?” I whispered to Marlowe.
“Everything, including the downstairs area.” When I began to protest, she said, “Fuckable women are hairless and smooth, like little girls.” I felt shocks in my fingers and toes as I followed the pink-coated woman through the salon and down a flight of stairs at the back.
The esthetician spoke English with an unidentified Lati
n American accent. “I’m Liliana,” she said, looking me over. “Take it all off, except the bra.” She turned her back, as if privacy were going to be possible. I realized I hadn’t shaved my legs or armpits in months. The hair was dark and baby fine. I didn’t want Liliana to see, but there was nothing I could do. I lay down on the table. She waxed my legs and underarms, my upper lip and eyebrows, then took a pair of scissors from a drawer. “Don’t move,” she said as she began cutting the hair between my legs. She cut from the top all the way down to my ass. “You want a little Hitler?” she asked me. Had she said Hitler? “You want a little Hitler here?” she said again, putting her fingers on my mons. “Little strip, like Hitler mustache?” I said no.
Liliana dusted me with white powder, as if I were an enormous baby. She spread hot wax into every crevice and fold, all over my vulva and the sides of my legs, ripping off the wax with strips of cloth as she went. I gritted my teeth and held on to the table as what felt like a thousand ants bit me in the crotch at once. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” I mumbled when I saw the silver cross flailing around Liliana’s neck. She lifted my left leg up, bending it at the knee and pressing it back toward my chest. She asked me to hold it there while she grunted and smeared the wax around. “Hold it! Hold it!” This part of my body was a wild expanse of uncharted territory, unknown to man, but Liliana wasn’t deterred, attacking the thicket with gusto. She wiped off the blood with cotton pads, then slathered me with antiseptic ointment. I rolled over onto my stomach and she continued her work, spreading my butt apart and smearing wax in the crease, ripping it off with the strips. She asked me to get up on my hands and knees so she could have a better view, and pulled stray hairs with a tweezer. I was so embarrassed, I nearly left my body and floated to the ceiling. I wondered what it was like for the tiny Latina immigrant to spend her days in this basement room, her face in women’s vulvas and asses, making perfect Hitler mustaches. The American dream, I thought.
When I left the room, I felt like I’d just stepped off a roller coaster, winded and dizzy. I limped up the stairs, grasping the wooden rail. In the mirror I saw that my face was swollen and red, as if I’d been slapped around. I went to a drugstore to buy some ibuprofen. Marlowe trailed after me, but I didn’t speak to her. “Are you all right?” she said when we were outside the drugstore and I was trying to remove the childproof cap from the bottle of painkillers with my teeth. She took the bottle from me and opened it. “I feel weird, like something is missing,” I said, washing down the pills with Diet Coke (FREE FOOD).
“No cushioning,” said Marlowe. “You’re like an animal without her fur.”
Next Marlowe took me to a department store, leading me to the plus-size area that was euphemistically labeled the “women’s section,” and Marlowe said, “Aren’t we all women?” We were there to buy new bras and underpants. Marlowe read aloud from her book as we browsed the bikini briefs, boy shorts, and thongs, all of which were referred to as panties, as I had called my underwear when I was a little girl. Marlowe picked out a selection for me. When I tried on the bras in the dressing room, they actually gave me cleavage, like a busty wench in a pirate movie.
The salesgirl said I needed to buy Thinz. “No offense. Even lingerie models have to suck it in.” Thinz were the latest must-have item, like a girdle except they were sleek and almost invisible. Thinz were sold for the bottom to compress the hips, stomach, and thighs; for the top, there was a squeezy camisole. Putting on Thinz felt like crawling into a caterpillar’s skin. Marlowe paid for the lot of it.
I left the department store wearing control-top tights and Thinz under my clothes. On my feet were the pair of impossibly high heels Marlowe had purchased on the way out. The heels thrust my bust forward and my butt up. Marlowe read from her book as we navigated the crowds in Herald Square. “Page ninety-seven: The fuckable woman puts her secondary sex characteristics on display, like a baboon with a throbbing red ass.”
I hadn’t worn heels since my college graduation and felt like a kid who’d raided her mother’s closet. I hobbled down the street and held onto Marlowe for support. “I can’t breathe,” I said, and complained that I couldn’t bend or sit either, thanks to Thinz. I was a sausage in casing. All of my rolls and layers were squeezed in, but where had they gone?
Marlowe said, “A fuckable woman doesn’t take up space. Fuckable women are controlled.”
I said, “Control-top pantyhose.”
“Fat women are not controlled. They are defiant, so they are unfuckable.”
Once again I wondered about the logic of this makeover. How would telling me I’m unfuckable change my mind about the surgery?
Marlowe and I stopped at a coffeehouse for a break. I took the shoes off and instantly felt the symptoms of withdrawal, the zaps in my feet, the little pulses of heat. I stood next to the table and drank my iced coffee (183), since I couldn’t sit down. “What is the point of Thinz?” I asked, hoping that my liver and kidneys and everything else that was in there hadn’t become dislodged. “If you appear more fuckable because of Thinz, and then someone wants to . . . fuck you,” I whispered, “then you go home and undress and everything just flops out. Won’t that lead to shock and disappointment? Maybe even despair?”
Marlowe licked the whipped cream off her fruit drink. “Haven’t you learned anything from your boss, Kitty? Being a woman means being a faker.” Outside, a pigeon limped on the sidewalk, a torn piece of donut lodged in its beak.
The makeover continued for days. Marlowe took me to a dermatologist, who injected my forehead with a toxin and suggested a range of treatments to erase my blemishes and newly emerging fine lines. Marlowe said this was important, since the fuckable female body is factory fresh and new, as if the shrink-wrap has just been removed. The doctor said I was no longer allowed to go out in the sun. I had my makeup done by an expert named Kevyn. At his suggestion, Marlowe bought me a selection of high-end cosmetics that cost more than a thousand dollars. I thought of Julia and Leeta in the Beauty Closet, but they were no longer a team, as Julia had informed me.
At a hair salon on Fifth Avenue I refused a drastic change, so my short black bob was trimmed and buffed and I was sent on my way to the manicurist. I splayed my fingers on the manicure table while Marlowe selected the paint color for me, a Ryla Cosmetics shade called Show ’Em the Pink. Then Marlowe and I attended a class called Strippercise, but Marlowe’s commentary didn’t go over well and we were escorted out by a security guard. A woman on the Upper East Side taught me how to do kegels.
After the penultimate task we were in a taxi and I felt exhausted, resting my head against the window, letting it bang on the glass every time we hit a bump. I was used to life in Brooklyn, hidden away in my apartment on Swann Street, trekking to the café and letting myself go like an overgrown garden. The makeover had been days of mowing and pulling weeds, a whole landscaping experience that was painful and disheartening. I still didn’t feel like Alicia. If anything, I had never felt more like Plum. It was her body I had seen in mirrors, her flesh that was painted and waxed and injected with toxin. If Alicia was buried under there, she was impossible to see.
“Next comes the dieting portion of the makeover,” Marlowe said, “but you’re having surgery instead. You’re cutting right to the front of the line, you cheater.” She took me to a plastic surgeon, Dr. Peter Ahmad, famous as the pioneer of the “mommy makeover,” a package deal that included a breast lift, tummy tuck, and vaginal rejuvenation. He also specialized in post–weight loss surgery reconstruction, which is why Marlowe chose him. In the waiting room, a nurse came for me. Her nails were painted the same shade as mine. Marlowe stayed in the waiting room as I was led to the doctor.
Dr. Ahmad asked me to disrobe. We stood in front of a full-length mirror, him in his suit, me naked. I had never been completely naked in front of a man before. The humiliation would have been overwhelming before, but I was numb from days of being prodded and worked over. Even the sight of my crotch—sleek as a hairless cat—didn’t inspire horr
or. As I stood before the mirror, beneath the bright lights, the shocks of Y—— withdrawal began to needle me again. I could feel them under my skin, but in the mirror I couldn’t see them.
“As I’m sure you know, on a diet your body shrinks slowly,” said Dr. Ahmad. “With the bypass you’ll lose the weight quickly, so you’ll be left with a lot of sagging skin. It will require a number of procedures, which I can do for you.” He took the cap off the black marker he was holding. “First thing is a tummy tuck,” he said. He lifted my stomach and pressed it in, as if it were clay. “You’ll have a flat stomach when we’re through. We’ll cut here,” he said, holding up my stomach with one hand and with the other drawing on me with the marker. He started on my left side and drew a dark, thick line all the way from left to right, showing me where the incisions would be and where he’d stitch me up. He let go of my stomach and let it flop back down.
“That’ll be a long scar.”
“It’ll fade over time. You won’t even notice it.” He moved his hands to my breasts, pushing them up, cupping them in his hands. “You’ll need your breasts lifted. I would also suggest implants to give you more fullness.” He drew on my breasts with the marker, showing me where he’d cut and stitch me back up. He traced around my nipples; in the mirror they looked like eyes, the wide outer rim of my stomach at the bottom a smiling mouth. “You’re not ever planning to breastfeed, are you? You probably won’t be able to after this procedure.” He showed me where my new nipples would be positioned, in a place higher than they’d ever been.
Next he asked me to hold my arms straight out. “Your batwings are pretty significant, so there will be a lot of hanging skin we’ll need to remove.” He drew on the flab hanging down from my upper arms. “We’ll do an arm lift. The scar will be in your armpit, so no one will see it.” I stood frozen with my arms outstretched as the doctor drew on me. He moved behind me and placed his hands on my butt. “The last big thing you’ll need is a complete lower body lift. We’ll remove the sagging skin from your thighs and your behind and then lift everything, giving you a smoother, tighter appearance.” He turned me around and gave me a handheld mirror so I could see my reflection in the larger mirror behind me. He bent over and continued to draw on my skin with the marker, long smooth lines and smaller dotted lines all over the back of me. I pictured him with a pair of scissors, cutting my flesh as if it were cloth.